Extract source Front Page Magazine:

Time to Arrest Hillary


Clinton's secret arms dealing -- and how it led to disaster in Libya.

July 16, 2015

Joseph Klein


Hillary Clinton led the charge in the Obama administration to go to war in Libya. Her objective was to overthrow the regime of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.  Not one to be deterred by opponents in the Pentagon and Congress to her reckless interventionist plans, Hillary decided to end-run them.  Her State Department helped facilitate what Andrew P. Napolitano in his scathing article has called “Hillary’s secret war.” When the secret war began to backfire, as arms ended up in the hands of anti-American jihadists, Hillary Clinton and other senior members of the Obama administration engaged in lies, obstructions of congressional investigations and scapegoating to cover their tracks.

An e-mail from Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff Jake Sullivan, dated August 21, 2011, to one of Hillary Clinton’s close associates, Cheryl Mills, and to then State Department spokesperson, Victoria Nuland, described Hillary’s central role involving Libya in these words:

“Secretary Clinton's leadership on Libya

HRC has been a critical voice on Libya in administration deliberations, at NATO, and in contact group meetings — as well as the public face of the U.S. effort in Libya. She was instrumental in securing the authorization, building the coalition, and tightening the noose around Qadhafi and his regime”

Hillary Clinton was not averse to using private parties to facilitate secret arms shipments to rebel forces in Libya. For example, she wrote an e-mail to Jake Sullivan on April 8, 2011, attaching an intelligence report from her confidante Sidney Blumenthal concerning Libya, in which she stated: “The idea of using private security experts to arm the opposition should be considered." 

An American arms dealer by the name of Marc Turi was the type of person that Hillary may have had in mind. On April 6, 2011. Mr. Turi e-mailed Christopher Stevens, who was at that time the special representative to the Libyan rebel alliance, later becoming the fallen ambassador to Libya after the Qaddafi regime was overthrown. Turi was looking for assistance from Mr. Stevens with regard to his application for a license to sell weapons directly to the rebels in Libya, which Turi had filed the previous month. Mr. Stevens responded with interest to Turi’s e-mail, saying that he would share Turi’s information with “my colleagues in Washington.”

Turi’s license to sell arms directly to the rebels was rejected. However, his subsequent application for a license to sell arms instead to Qatar, a supposed ally of the United States which had its own direct channels to Islamist rebel forces in Libya as well as in Syria, was granted by the State Department and Treasury Department in May 2011. As quoted by the New York Times, Mr. Turi said in an interview that, while he wanted to get weapons to Qatar, what “the U.S. government and Qatar allowed from there was between them.”

Qatar, as it turns out, donated money to the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation while Hillary was serving as Secretary of State.  At that same time, Qatar was seeking and obtaining State Department approvals for receiving arms shipments. Hillary’s State Department ignored a stipulation put into effect by her husband in 1995 requiring the State Department to take into account human rights abuses when evaluating whether to approve a country’s purchase of arms from U.S. companies.  In short, Qatar donated money to the Clinton Foundation while seeking approvals from Hillary Clinton’s State Department for arms purchases, which could in turn be shipped to the Libyan rebels whom Hillary was so intent on helping.

The problem with Qatar serving as an indirect conduit for shipment of arms supplied by private arms dealers such as Mr. Turi to Libyan or Syrian rebels was that Qatar could not be trusted to get the arms to so-called “moderate” rebel forces seen as friendly to the West. Qatar promoted a jihadist ideology shared by anti-Western Islamists in Libya to whom arms evidently were flowing from Qatar.

“The Qataris are supposedly good allies, but the Islamists they support are not in our interest,” as a former defense official quoted by the New York Times put it.

Yet, Qatar was receiving weapons from various American sources, presumably including the type of “private security experts” whom Hillary had urged be considered for arming “the opposition” in Libya.

As Andrew Napolitano explained, based on his review of State Department e-mails and other documentary materials:  “Many of the rebels Mrs. Clinton armed, using the weapons lawfully sold to Qatar by Mr. Turi and others, were terrorist groups who are our sworn enemies.”

Some of the weapons that fell into the hands of jihadists in Libya were possibly used in in the September 11, 2012 Benghazi attack against the U.S. diplomatic and intelligence compounds, resulting in the deaths of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

Steven’s last diary entry contained this foreboding : “Never ending security threats…”

What was Ambassador Stevens doing on September 11, 2012 in Benghazi, a hotbed of Islamic jihadists, in the first place? Was he involved in a covert program for shipping arms out of Libya to Syrian rebels, with Turkey being used as an intermediary? Circumstantial evidence points in that direction.